The Enhancement of Movable Books through New Digital Technologies: MUSLI’s Experiences and New Challenges

Abstract

Since the start of a museum center dedicated to children's books at MUSLI, special interest has been focused on animated books, starting with the digitisation of the most significant examples preserved in the Foundation's Archives. On the occasion of the inauguration - in 2008 - of MUSLI centre dedicated to books, in the exhibition spaces dedicated to animated books, above some showcases, video players were installed streaming short illustrative videos of the books on display and this allows to discover their peculiar characteristics.

At the same time, Computers with touch screen have been installed and some special applications have been designed in order to make their creative, artistic and educational potential accessible. Some examples are the software players allowing to "navigate" through the images and the digital simulations of leverage books allowing to understand the devices (which would otherwise remain hidden) and "give life" to the characters represented. Still digitization always offers new challenges: robotics with open source projects interfaced with books, augmented reality, playful and didactic apps, 3D photogrammetry, all of this is new lymph for the fruition of animated books in a museum environment.

Currently, the research is aimed at developing applications with programming languages suitable for online use and their publication on the Foundation's websites, in particular making them available to schools.